US State of Kansas recognizes the Holodomor as genocide of the Ukrainian people
The American state of Kansas recognized the Holodomor of 1932-33 as genocide of the Ukrainian people, the press service of the Ukrainian Embassy in the US reported on Facebook. "The proclamation, which designates 2018 the year of commemoration in Kansas of the victims of this tragedy, was signed by the governor of the state Jeff Colyer," the report says.
Kansas became the tenth US state to make the declaration. Earlier, the Holodomor in Ukraine was recognized as genocide in nine US states: Washington, Wisconsin, Illinois, Massachusetts, Michigan, New Jersey, New York, Oregon and Pennsylvania.
Across the globe, the parliaments of Canada, Australia, Georgia, Poland, Portugal, Hungary, Latvia, Lithuania, Estonia, Ecuador, Colombia, Mexico, Paraguay, Peru and Chile also made the declaration.
In 2017, President Petro Poroshenko called on Congress to recognize the Holodomor as genocide of the Ukrainian people.
Canada was the first country in 2008 to recognize the Holodomor as an act of genocide against Ukrainians. Since that time, the country's parliament regularly hosts official events on the occasion of the anniversary of those terrible events. Prime Minister of Canada Justin Trudeau said the Holodomor was "a failed attempt to destroy the identity of the Ukrainian people."
In 2010, the Ukrainian court examined the criminal case of the Holodomor of 1932-1933 and found the then leadership of the USSR and the Ukrainian SSR guilty of committing genocide of the Ukrainian people, outlined in Part 1 of Section 442 of the Criminal Code of Ukraine. The court acknowledged that the famine was caused by Joseph Stalin (Dzhugashvili), Vyacheslav Molotov (Skryabin), Lazar Kaganovich, Pavel Postyshev, Stanislav Kosior, Vlas Chubar and Mendel Khatayevich.